103 The task of philosophy

 I once asked my granddaughter, at age 11, to define philosophy, and she said: ‘dealing with questions that cannot be answered’.

Philosophy starts where science ends, and has shrunk while science expanded, but questions that science cannot (yet) answer remain to pound our minds. To give an example: neuroscience has not yet replaced philosophical discussion on the true, the good and the beautiful, and perhaps it never will. When we think of a mathematical formula there are certainly things going on in the neurons in our brain, but that does not tell us about the formula.  

Philosophy does not have reliable answers either, but questions force themselves on thought, even if final answers seem illusory. Philosophy entails wonder without end. There are many ways to look at the world and none of them are perfect, fixed or final. Partial and temporary anwers may still be useful, in what I have called imperfection on the move.

Philosophy had the pretense to impose a complete and rigorous logic on thought and language, but those attempts stranded.

Philosophy of science had the pretense to prescribe how science is to be done, but one attempt after the other was shown to fail. Yet, I think there is still something useful to be said on this. I tried to say it in this blog, in my presentation of pragmatist philosophy, and a discussion of problems of objectivity, universals, and meaning (in items 23-37). That yields a critical view of science but no strict rules of how to conduct it.

Some philosophers claim that philosophy cannot and should not try to offer answers or practical solutions or guidelines. I consider that a cop-out. If philosophy has nothing useful to say it should remain silent. What it has to say, however, is not in the nature of indubitable laws or rules. It may be paradoxical, tentative, preliminary, or even quizzical.

Philosophy is not entirely unscientific, in the sense that it does, or should, try to test itself on the basis of observation. Often, however, the phenomena are those of human nature, conduct, cognition, culture and society, which cannot all be caught in measurement.

Exploring beyond the boundaries of knowledge and meaning one inevitably moves beyond facts because one is questioning the frames in which facts are caught. The point is, however, not to ignore facts when they are pertinent. While facts do not yield rock-bottom truth, we can often reasonably agree on them. Philosophy of mind goes beyond neural science but what it says should not be impossible in the light of what we know about how neuronal networks operate.

Furthermore, as I argued earlier in this blog (in item 98), science inevitably harbours the partiality of discipline. Policy making and political debate need to bridge scientific disciplines, patchworking partialities. They must deal with the incommensurable.

Philosophy should use scientific insights as its material to build ideas from. This is also what we mean by ‘wisdom’: combining bits of heterogeneous insights into a vision on the good life. That is what I have been trying to do in this blog, discussing perennial philosophical issues while taking into account insights from evolutionary theory, psychology, social psychology, brain science, sociology, and economics.